Technologizer

Have you ever wanted to watch YouTube on your TV?

I have, ever since Tivo started allowing YouTube streaming to their DVRs back in July 2008. And I’m here to confess: I’m a huge fan. Watching YouTube on my HDTV has radically changed how I “watch TV”.

One night I decided to do an experiment. I skipped watching regular prime time TV and only watched YouTube videos from my Tivo. I signed in to YouTube, so I could access my favorites, and playlists. Two hours later, I found that it was a very fascinating journey.

What did I watch? Anything that looked interesting, including some of my old YouTube favorites. Mostly, I let the videos lead me to the next one via suggestions and related content. It was an exercise in random discovery. I followed certain YouTube users. Then I would backtrack a bit and find myself on another trail of YouTube discovery. I spent some time watching music videos. I searched for classic Internet favorite videos. I even watched some of YouTube’s promoted videos, and found some of them were pretty good. (My current favorite is something called Thru-You, a YouTube mashup, where someone grabbed random musical clips from YouTube and created awesome songs.)

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It appears as if the Obama Administration has decided to stop using YouTube as a method to embed its videos into websites for the Government. Starting with this weeks address, videos are now served in Flash through technology provided by Akamai.

While most seem to be labeling it as a way to answer privacy concerns, I always thought it kind of weird for a government entity to be using a branded solution for streaming media.

Our government (in theory at least) is supposed to not show any favoritism towards any one company. Seeing that big ol’ YouTube logo everytime I watched the President’s address always seemed slightly odd.

If it did have to do with privacy concerns, YouTube had actually made some effort to strengthen its privacy policy for those watching videos on government websites. Apparently the Administration didn’t get the message there.

Videos would still be pushed to YouTube as they have been before. However it now appears that Akamai’s technology will serve them on the actual government site.

Monday? Again? Here’s what’s newsy:

AOL beefs up Bebo service.

Microsoft wants severance money back.

Ten iPhone Apps Apple Nixed

Web radio: In trouble. Still.

Sorry, no YouTube Oscar clips.

Yahoo management shakeup imminent.

Microsoft offers free tech training.

Streaming-only Netflix coming. Eventually.

That Last.fm RIAA story? Fiction.

America: Tops in broadband. Really?

J0bs misses Apple annual meeting.

Some observant folks noticed last month that YouTube was dabbling with letting users download videos from the site to their hard drives. The YouTube blog just made it official: The company is permitting content providers to allow their videos to be downloaded, either for a fee (via Google Checkout) or for free.

It still sounds fairly experimental: YouTube is only working with a few content sources, including Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Khan Academy, HouseholdHacker, and PogoBat. And even with them, the download option isn’t universally available–actually, I’m not seeing it on any of the first half-dozen videos I’ve checked.

This isn’t earthshaking news–for one thing, tools like KeepVid have allowed YouTube fans to snag videos and save them for a long time. The YouTube videos are in unprotected MPEG4 format: I assume this means that YouTube isn’t going to enable downloading on the massive amount of stuff it offers that consists of short, unauthorized clips of copyrighted material. And while YouTube is also experimenting with streaming official versions of Hollywood content, it seems unlikely that the entertainment industry is ready to allow DRM-free downloads of current shows. At least right now.

Here’s a statistic that’s bandied about by game industry cheerleaders: roughly 40 percent of U.S. homes own a video game console.

It’s also a figure that will likely be loathed by cable providers if more streaming video Web sites follow YouTube’s lead. Yesterday, Google’s video juggernaut launched a sleek interface for the PlayStation 3 and Wii. It was as good a reason as any to dust off Nintendo’s waggle box, so I checked it out. The service is basically what you would expect and hope for–a browsing and viewing experience that’s tailored to the size of your television screen. A similar channel is already available for TiVo owners.

Of course, YouTube is best for short bursts of random entertainment, and it only makes me yearn for support of a full-featured TV Web site, like Hulu or TV.com. See, I recently gave up cable to find out how much content I could replace with the Internet (and I’m not alone). As a cost-cutting measure, it’s great, but running an RGB cable between my computer and laptop isn’t ideal when I just want to lounge on the couch.

Solutions are on the way, like media streamers and possibly HDTVs that can support Hulu, but that requires an extra purchase. If you’re among the 40 percent that already has a gaming console, chances are you’d want it to be the hub for streaming Internet television instead of something extra. There is a utility called PlayOn that lets you watch Hulu and other sites on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, but it requires a computer as the middleman. This can get clumsy if your wireless Internet is on the spotty side.

There’s been some hinting at integration with streaming TV Web sites, at least for the Xbox 360. Here’s hoping it actually happens.

[UPDATE: My colleague Ed Oswald reminds me that we covered this a month ago. It sounded familiar...]

TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington has pointed out a new feature in embedded YouTube videos I hadn’t noticed: a search bar. Mike thinks it’s ugly. I wouldn’t argue that it’s gorgeous, but it’s kind of handy, since it turns every embedded YouTube clip into a mini-YouTube that lets you rummage through the video site’s entire addictive cornucopia of stuff without leaving the site you were on in the first place.

Rather than trying to explain this, I can give you a video and let you try searching right now. Look, here you go:

If, after watching the Shatner Vic-20 ad above, you got in the mood to watch more commercials with Bill, you’d do a search something like the one below. And could watch several hundred clips without ever leaving Technologizer. (The image below is just an image, not live YouTube–as far as I know, you can’t embed search results, although it would be nifty if you could.)

(You know, I kinda liked Shatner-as-spokesman better back when having William Shatner in your ad wasn’t in itself some sort of allegedly hip, postmodern statement.)

On today’s Web, when a lot of the content and functionality on sites such as Technologizer is really someone else’s embedded service, it’s easy for those of us who do the embedding to feel proprietary and paranoid about changes: All the millions of YouTube videos that folks have incorporated over the past few years now have that search bar, whether we embedders want it there or not. But what really matters is whether YouTube watchers like the new search feature. And I bet they will…

YouTube intends to restrict access to content that might be deemed pornographic or profane in a play to broaden its appeal and attract more of the highbrow audience that enjoys watching panda bears sneeze.

In a blog post today, the YouTube team explained the impending changes. In the near future, videos will be algorithmically demoted if they contain sexually suggestive content and naughty words. The video site is also taking measures to place an age restriction on risque content.

Guidelines on what exactly constitutes “sexually suggestive content,” have been published on the YouTube Web site. Some of those are:

* Whether breasts, buttocks, or genitals (clothed or unclothed) are the focal point of the video;

* Whether the video setting is sexually suggestive (e.g. a location generally associated with sexual activity, such as a bed);

* Whether the subject is depicted in a pose that is intended to sexually arouse the viewer;

* Whether the subject’s actions in the video suggests a willingness to engage in sexual activity (e.g. kissing, provocative dancing, fondling); and

* If a subject is minimally clothed, whether the clothing would be acceptable in appropriate public contexts (e.g. swimwear vs. underwear).

There is sure to be some collateral damage resulting from these guidelines, but if one child is speared spared the graphic image of a middle-aged man wearing a poorly fitting Speedo, the future will be a little bit brighter for all of us. The question of when booty poppin goes too far remains open to interpretation.

Additional changes will affect how thumbnails are generated, and revised guidelines for tags, titles, and other metadata may lead to more accurate descriptions of videos.

Feedback left by YouTube users about the blog posting was largely negative. One read, “Youtube was not meant to be a family site. If it continues in this direction it will destroy the basic mission and user base of the site.” Others, however, welcomed the proposed changes as “great news” and “overdue.”

YouTube may be the Web’s biggest video site, but YouTube’s videos have never been the Web’s biggest. In resolution, that is–in fact, the YouTube player has been looking increasingly cramped and retro compared to its roomy rivals at sites such as Hulu.

As of today, though, YouTube has increased the size of its player to 640 pixels wide–which is, coincidentally enough, the same width as Hulu’s player. The new player is in widescreen 16:9 format, but most content up on YouTube is old-school 4:3, so you usually get black bars. The extra real estate is still nice, though. Examples after the jump.

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Today’s news that Circuit City, American’s second-largest electronics retailer, has filed for bankruptcy left me sad. And, oddly enough, nostalgic. The City isn’t going out of business, but as I reflected on its woes I thought about all the electronics chains I’ve shopped at over the years–the vast majority of which are no longer with us. (If Circuit City were to close its doors, it would leave only Best Buy and RadioShack as truly national chains focused solely on consumer electronics of all sorts, right?)

Once I got nostalgic, I did what I often do in such situations: I headed to YouTube. Which is rife with old commercials for defunct electronics retailers. Many of these chains basically did themselves in through poor management or inability to change with the times, and I thought some of them were shabby even when I did business with them; But it’s fun to get reacquainted with them through the miracle of streaming video.

After the jump, a look back, mostly in chronological order sorted by the year of the chain’s demise (click on the year for more details on the circumstances of its death).

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Looks like it’s all but official: The New York Times is reporting that YouTube will announce on Monday that it’s struck a deal with MGM to put movies and TV shows from that studio’s library on YouTube in legal, full-length, ad-sponsored form.

The examples that the Times gives make it sound like MGM isn’t exactly uploading all its crown jewels to YouTube in one fell swoop: They include the feature films The Magnificent Seven, Bulletproof Monk, and old episodes of American Gladiators.

The content may not be transcendent, but the arrangement is a meaningful moment of glasnost between YouTube and Hollywood, which have spent far more time making war with each other than making nice. The current-day MGM is a struggling shadow of its former self, but perhaps its move will lead bigger studios to consider striking deals with YouTube rather than demanding that their stuff be taken down.

YouTube’s interest in MGM content is presumably in part a defensive move to gird itself to compete with Hulu, the all-professional-content video site that’s best known for its scads of TV shows, but which also has some movies. Like, oh, for instance, Moby Dick:

(Okay, we’re back. Sorry–I’ve always wanted to run a John Huston movie on my site.)

It’s inevitable that all video content will eventually migrate its way to the Web in one form or another, but nearly all of the details remain fuzzy–most importantly, how quickly it’ll all happen, which sites and services will get the content, and whether ad-support and fee-based venues will both thrive. I’m not making any predictions about how things will play out, but I’m glad to see even baby steps in the right direction. And hey, I’ve never seen The Magnificent Seven in its entirety…

While searching for videos on today’s election happenings, I stumbled upon a feature which must have just recently been added to embedded videos. The functionality allows for a search box to appear at the top of the video when users are finished watching the video, or during the video after clicking the embed/url information option.

After the search query is typed, the search results appear in-line, meaning the user would never leave the page where the video was embedded. This has to be seen as a postive by website owners, since they will retain that set of eyes. On the web, that is as good as gold — and when you lose eyes, there’s a good chance they won’t come back.

I’m still not seeing any announcement from YouTube officially announcing the functionality, and I’m not expecting anything either since its relatively minor. However the implications for those who embed videos into their sites are obviously much more significant.

Pictures of the search option are below the fold.

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YouTube said late Friday that it would begin to offer full-length television shows through the site, initially partnering with CBS. Among the shows now available are select episodes of Star Trek, The Young & The Restless, Beverly Hills 90210, and Californication, among others.

The TV shows would be provided at no charge and would include advertisements that would play before, during, and after the videos. CBS will sell the advertising for the show, and YouTube would get a cut of the revenues.

Here’s hoping that this deal is a sign of improving relations between the video site and the entertainment industry. As you may remember, CBS was formerly a part of Viacom, the company who sued YouTube for $1 billion in March of last year.

While Viacom no longer has anything to do with the production arm of CBS any longer (it only retains rights to MTV Networks, BET Networks, Paramount, and Paramount Pictures’ home entertainment operations), the ties are still there. This move could wrm Viacom’s heart ever so slightly, and may give YouTube a slight edge in any negotiations.

It also seems to be a bit of a concession on the part of the entertainment industry that it needs the leading online video site. While industry-backed sites like Hulu are doing okay, they aren’t even close to touching YouTube.

Maybe its time for the two sides to bury the hatchet, as it would be financially beneficial for all. As the old adage goes, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”